The bargain book table at Barnes and Noble is a place I have stumbled across hidden gems many times. This was one. I had never heard of the author but the cover and title caught my eye so I picked it up and read the back cover. It sounded like a story I would enjoy and with a 2 for $8 special I grabbed it. The last time I stumbled across a book this way was Brooklyn which was also a hit with me.
The Sweetness of Forgetting is a romance, a family drama, a Holocaust story, and a redemption story. Told in the present as Hope and her daughter Annie deal with the pain of Hope's divorce and watching Hope's grandmother Rose slip further away from them as her Alzheimer's progresses and from Rose's point of view in flashbacks as the present slips away and the past is coming back to Rose. Along the way Hope learns what it means to love, who her family is, how to help her daughter, and what it is she wants to do with her life. And none of it is what she thought it would be.
Hope runs the bakery Rose started 60 years ago in Cape Cod but the economy has caused her to be in a bind with the bank and she is close to losing it. In the midst of this, Rose in a moment of startling clarity, sends Hope on a mission to Paris to find out what became of a list of people without telling Hope who they are. What Hope finds is so much more than she imagined. The heartbreak of the rounding up of French Jews and what was happening to Jewish people in the camps is something Hope learns about through the people she meets trying to find out who the list of people are to Rose. And Hope finds so much more, she finds family, love, hope, and faith.
A sweet and sad story, well written as it crosses from what could have been a Harlequin type romance into really so much more. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
(Finished July 9, 2017)
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